People make the DRG Magic Defense out to be a bigger hinderance than it really is, just like you said. You either live or you die. The amount of damage a DRG would take is partially mitigated by their health and mostly mitigated by the healers. Even as a BRD with those incredibly superior defensive numbers I can get one or two shot by screwing up mechanics in T10. Like Ken said, there are DRG who have cleared T12. Shit's not impossible. Not even remotely.
Better yet: The most consistent source of magic damage in T10 is mitigation irrelevant. it deals a static amount. The rest is mechanics based and dying to it most likely leads to raid wipes anyway.
T12 is the one encounter where I'd say it's possibly bad news to have a DRG but it's raid wide damage anyway so there's constant heals going out from the start. DRGs are still going to have better EHP vs these attacks than, say, both Healers and casters (barring VIT accessories).
You are assuming because you can cheese Megaflare on 9 that you can do the same later on in Final Coil where that's simply not the case because the two attacks are not the same.
I feel like the best way to put it is that a lot of the numbers thrown around are raw damage numbers. For instance, I need roughly 6000 HP to survive an attack in Phase 3 of T11. Sacred Soil and Succor + natural HP gets me there. If I can gear beyond 6k, I'll survive without it.
It's not really cheesing it, per se, but that target HP numbers can, and often do, include Stoneskin / Adlo for figuring out how to get to it. Getting to that number _without_ them is the goal, however, since it alleviates healer burden.
That said, there's still plenty of attacks that I'd be overkilled so hard by without a full debuff and buff setup anyway that I'm pretty sure I'll never reach a VIT level to survive it otherwise.